Communist Party of Great Britain

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was a communist political party that existed in the United Kingdom from 1920 to 1991. The CPGB was formed as a merger of several smaller communist and socialist parties, and it argued the party should be open only to revolutionary cadres and not to all applicants. During the 1926 general strike, most CPGB leaders were imprisoned, and the party was involved in subversive activities for years. The CPGB followed a Stalinist form of communism, setting it apart from left-wing communist parties in Western Europe, and it was a propaganda machine for Nazi Germany from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 until Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. Afterwards, the CPGB supported the war effort during World War II, which it had previously claimed was a war between two imperialist alliances. In 1945, after winning 103,000 votes, two Communists were elected to Parliament, only to lose their seats in the 1950 elections. During the 1960s and 1970s, the party declined as a result of the split between the Soviet Union and China, as the party was split between pro-Moscow party members and autonomous members. By 1977, some anti-Eurocommunist members of the party decided that they needed to form their own anti-revisionist party, and the party disbanded in 1991, the same year as the collapse of the USSR. The party proceeded to dissolve into the smaller Communist Party of Britain and various other factions and think tanks.